Ultra was the designation adopted by British military intelligence in June 1941 for wartime signals intelligence obtained by "breaking" high-level encrypted enemy radio and teleprinter communications at the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park. "Ultra" eventually became the standard designation among the western Allies for all such intelligence. The name arose because the intelligence thus obtained was considered more important than that designated by the highest British security classification then used (Most Secret) and so was regarded as being Ultra secret. Several other cryptonyms had been used for such intelligence. British intelligence first designated it "Boniface"—presumably to imply that it was the result of human intelligence. The U.S. used the codename "Magic" for its decrypts from Japanese sources.
Much of the German cipher traffic was encrypted on the Enigma machine. Used properly, the German military Enigma would have been virtually unbreakable; in practice, shortcomings in operation allowed it to be broken. The term "Ultra" has often been used almost synonymously with "Enigma decrypts". However, Ultra also encompassed decrypts of the German Lorenz SZ 40/42 machines that were used by the German High Command, and the Hagelin machine and other Italian and Japanese ciphers and codes such as PURPLE and JN-25.
Many observers, at the time and later, regarded Ultra as immensely valuable to the Allies. Winston Churchill told King George VI: "It was thanks to Ultra that we won the war." F. W. Winterbotham, quoted the western Supreme Allied Commander, Dwight D. Eisenhower, at war's end describing Ultra as having been "decisive" to Allied victory. Sir Harry Hinsley, official historian of British Intelligence in World War II, made a similar assessment about Ultra, saying that it shortened the war "by not less than two years and probably by four years"; moreover, in the absence of Ultra, it is uncertain how the war would have ended.
After the War, interrogation of German cryptographic personnel led to the conclusion that German cryptanalysts understood that cryptanalytic attacks against Enigma were possible, but they had been thought to require impracticable amounts of effort and investment. It was the Poles' early start at breaking Enigma, and the continuity of their successful efforts, that enabled the Allies to hit the ground running when World War II broke out.
Some Purple decrypts proved useful elsewhere, for instance detailed reports by Japan's ambassador to Germany which were encrypted on the Purple machine. These reports included reviews of Germany's assessments of the military situation, of strategy and intentions, reports on direct inspections (in one case, of Normandy beach defenses) by the ambassador, and reports of long interviews with Hitler.
The chief fleet communications code system used by the Imperial Japanese Navy was called JN-25 by the Americans. By early 1942, the latter had made considerable progress into decrypting Japanese naval messages.
The Japanese are said to have obtained an Enigma machine as early as 1937, although it is debated whether they were given it by their German ally or bought a commercial version which, except for plugboard and internal wirings, was essentially the German Army / Air Force machine. The Japanese did not use it for their top secret communications, instead developing their own, similar machine.
Dissemination of Ultra intelligence to field commanders was carried out by MI6, which operated Special Liaison Units (SLU) attached to major army and air force commands. The activity was organized and supervised on behalf of MI6 by Group Captain Frederick William Winterbotham. Each SLU included intelligence, communications, and cryptographic elements. It was headed by a British Army or RAF officer, usually a major, known as "Special Liaison Officer". The main function of the Liaison Officer or his deputy was to pass Ultra intelligence bulletins to the commander of the command he was attached to, or to other indoctrinated staff officers. In order to safeguard Ultra, special precautions were taken. The standard procedure was for the liaison officer to present the intelligence summary to the recipient, stay with him while he studied it, then take it back and destroy it.
Fixed SLUs existed at the Admiralty, the War Office, the Air Ministry and at RAF Fighter Command. These units had permanent teleprinter links to Bletchley Park.
Mobile SLUs were attached to field army and air force headquarters, and depended on radio communications to receive intelligence summaries.
The first mobile SLUs appeared during the French campaign of 1940. An SLU supported the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) headed by General Lord Gort. The first liaison officers were Robert Gore-Browne and Humphrey Plowden. A second SLU of the 1940 period was attached to the RAF Advanced Air Striking Force at Meaux commanded by Air Vice-Marshal P H Lyon Playfair. This SLU was commanded by Squadron Leader F.W. "Tubby" Long.
Arthur "Bomber" Harris, officer commanding RAF Bomber Command, was not cleared for ULTRA. After D-Day, with the resumption of the strategic bomber campaign over Germany, Harris remained wedded to area bombardment. Historian Frederick Taylor argues that, as Harris was not cleared for access to ULTRA, he was given some information gleaned from Enigma but not the information's source. This affected his attitude about post-D-Day directives to target oil installations, since he did not know that senior Allied commanders were using high-level German sources to assess just how much this was hurting the German war effort; thus Harris tended to see the directives to bomb specific oil and munitions targets as a "panacea" (his word) and a distraction from the real task.
The communications element of each SLU was called a "Special Communications Unit" or SCU. Radio transmitters were constructed at Whaddon Hall workshops, while receivers were the National HRO, made in the USA. The SCUs were highly mobile and the first such units used civilian Packard cars. The following SCUs are listed: SCU1 (Whaddon Hall), SCU2 (France before 1940, India), SCU3 (Hanslope Park) SCU5, SCU6 (possibly Algiers and Italy), SCU7 (training unit in the UK), SCU8 (Europe after D-day), SCU9 (Europe after D-day), SCU11 (Palestine and India), SCU12 (India), SCU13 and SCU14.
The cryptographic element of each SLU was supplied by the RAF and was based on the TYPEX cryptographic machine and one-time pad systems.
RN Ultra messages from the OIC to ships at sea were necessarily transmitted over normal naval radio circuits and were protected by one-time pad encryption.
At Bletchley Park, extensive indexes were kept of the information in the messages decrypted. For each message the traffic analysis recorded the radio frequency, the date and time of intercept, and the preamble—which contained the network-identifying discriminant, the time of origin of the message, the callsign of the originating and receiving stations, and the indicator setting. This allowed cross referencing of a new message with a previous one. The indexes included message preambles, every person, every ship, every unit, every weapon, every technical term and of repeated phrases such as forms of address and other German military jargon that might be usable as cribs.
The first decryption of a wartime Enigma message was achieved by the Poles at PC Bruno on 17 January 1940, albeit one that had been transmitted three months earlier. Little had been achieved by the start of the Allied campaign in Norway in April. At the start of the Battle of France on 10 May 1940, the Germans made a very significant change in the indicator procedures for Enigma messages. However, the Bletchley Park cryptanalysts had anticipated this, and were able—jointly with PC Bruno—to resume breaking messages from 22 May, although often with some delay. The intelligence that these messages yielded was of little operational use in the fast-moving situation of the German advance.
Decryption of Enigma traffic built up gradually during 1940, with the first two prototype bombes being delivered in March and August. The traffic was almost entirely limited to Luftwaffe messages. By the peak of the Battle of the Mediterranean in 1941, however, Bletchley Park was deciphering daily 2,000 Italian Hagelin messages. By the second half of 1941 30,000 Enigma messages a month were being deciphered, rising to 90,000 a month of Enigma and Fish decrypts combined later in the war.
Some of the contributions that Ultra intelligence made to the Allied successes are given below.
In April 1940, Ultra information provided a detailed picture of the disposition of the German forces, and then their movement orders for the attack on the Low Countries prior to the Battle of France in May.
An Ultra decrypt of June 1940 read KNICKEBEIN KLEVE IST AUF PUNKT 53 GRAD 24 MINUTEN NORD UND EIN GRAD WEST EINGERICHTET ("The Cleves Knickebein is directed at position 53 degrees 24 minutes north and 1 degree west"). This was the definitive piece of evidence that Dr R V Jones of scientific intelligence in the Air Ministry needed to show that the Germans were developing a radio guidance system for their bombers. Ultra intelligence then continued to play a vital role in the so-called Battle of the Beams.
During the Battle of Britain, Air Chief Marshall Sir Hugh Dowding, Commander-in-Chief of RAF Fighter Command, had a teleprinter link from Bletchley Park to his headquarters at RAF Bentley Priory for Ultra reports. Ultra intelligence kept him informed of the German strategy, of the strength and location of various Luftwaffe units and often provided advance warning of bombing raids (but not of their specific targets). These contributed to the British success. Dowding was bitterly and sometimes unfairly criticized by others who did not see Ultra, but did not disclose his source.
Ultra intelligence provided a great deal of information about the Germans' planned Operation Sea Lion to invade England in 1940. Had the invasion been attempted, Britain would have been well prepared.
Ultra revealed that a major German air raid was planned for the night of 14 November 1940, and indicated three possible targets, including London and Coventry. However, the specific target was not determined until late on the afternoon of 14 November, by detection of the German radio guidance signals. Unfortunately, countermeasures failed to prevent the devastating Coventry Blitz. F. W. Winterbotham claimed that Churchill had advance warning, but intentionally did nothing about the raid, to safeguard Ultra. This claim has been comprehensively refuted by R V Jones, Sir David Hunt, Ralph Bennett and Peter Calvocoressi. Ultra warned of a raid but did not reveal the specific target. Churchill, who had been en route to Ditchley Park, was told that London might be bombed, and returned to 10 Downing Street so that he could observe the raid from the Air Ministry roof.
Ultra intelligence considerably aided the British Army's victory over the much larger Italian army in Libya in December 1940-February 1941.
Ultra intelligence greatly aided the Royal Navy's victory over the Italian navy in the Battle of Cape Matapan in March 1941.
Although the Allies lost the Battle of Crete in May 1941, the Ultra intelligence that a parachute landing was planned meant that heavy losses were inflicted on the Germans and that fewer British troops were captured.
Ultra intelligence fully revealed the preparations for Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the USSR. Although this information was passed to the Soviet government, Stalin refused to believe it. The information did, however, help British planning, knowing that substantial German forces were to be deployed to the East.
Ultra intelligence made a very significant contribution in the Battle of the Atlantic. Winston Churchill wrote "The only thing that ever really frightened me during the war was the U-boat peril." The decryption of Enigma signals to the U-boats was much more difficult than those of the Luftwaffe. It was not until June 1941 that Bletchley Park was able to read a significant amount of this traffic currently. Transatlantic convoys were then diverted away from the U-boat "wolfpacks", and U-boat supply vessels sunk. On 1 February 1942, Enigma U-boat traffic became unreadable because of the introduction of a different 4-rotor Enigma machine. This situation persisted until December 1942, although other German naval Enigma messages were still being deciphered, such as those of the U-boat training command at Kiel. From December 1942 to the end of the war, Ultra allowed Allied convoys to evade U-boat patrol lines, and guided Allied anti-submarine forces to the location of U-boats at sea.
In the Western Desert Campaign, Ultra intelligence helped Wavell and Auchinleck to prevent Rommel's forces from reaching Cairo in the autumn of 1941.
Ultra intelligence from Hagelin decrypts, and from Luftwaffe and German naval Enigma decrypts, helped sink about half of the ships supplying the Axis in North Africa.
Ultra intelligence from Abwehr transmissions confirmed that Britain's Security Service (MI5) had captured all German agents in Britain, and that the Abwehr still believed in the many double agents which MI5 controlled under the Double Cross System. This enabled major deception operations.
Deciphered JN-25 messages allowed the U.S. to turn back a Japanese offensive in the Battle of the Coral Sea in April 1942 and set up the decisive American victory at the Battle of Midway in June 1942.
Ultra contributed very significantly to the monitoring of German developments at Peenemünde and the collection of V-1 and V-2 Intelligence from 1942 onwards.
Ultra provided evidence that the Allied landings in French North Africa (Operation Torch) were not anticipated.
A JN-25 decrypt of 14 April 1943 provided details of Admiral Yamamoto's forthcoming visit to Balalae Island, and on 18 April his aircraft was shot down, killing this man who was regarded as irreplaceable.
The part played by Ultra intelligence in the preparation for the Allied invasion of Sicily was of unprecedented importance. It provided information as to where the enemy's forces were strongest and that the elaborate strategic deceptions had convinced Hitler and the German high command.
The success of the Battle of North Cape, in which HMS Duke of York sank the German battleship Scharnhorst, was entirely built on prompt deciphering of German naval signals.
Both Enigma and Tunny decrypts showed Germany had been taken in by Operation Bodyguard, the deception operation to protect Operation Overlord. They revealled the Germans did not anticipate the Normandy landings and even after D-Day still believed Normandy was only a feint, with the main invasion to be in the Pas de Calais.
It warned of the major German counterattack at Mortain, and allowed the Allies to surround the forces at Falaise.
During the Allied advance to Germany, Ultra often provied detailed tactical information, and showed how Hitler ignored the advice of his generals and insisted on German troops fighting in place 'to the last man'.
To disguise the source of the intelligence for the Allied attacks on Axis supply ships bound for North Africa, "spotter" submarines and aircraft were sent to search for Axis ships. These searchers or their radio transmissions were observed by the Axis forces, who concluded their ships were being found by conventional reconnaissance. They suspected that there were some 400 Allied submarines in the Mediterranean and a huge fleet of reconnaissance aircraft on Malta. In fact, there were only 25 submarines and at times as few as three aircraft.
This procedure also helped conceal the intelligence source from Allied personnel, who might give away the secret by careless talk, or under interrogation if captured. Along with the search mission that would find the Axis ships, two or three additional search missions would be sent out to other areas, so that crews would not begin to wonder why a single mission found the Axis ships every time.
Other deceptive means were used. On one occasion, a convoy of five ships sailed from Naples to North Africa with essential supplies at a critical moment in the North African fighting. There was no time to have the ships properly spotted beforehand. The decision to attack solely on Ultra intelligence went directly to Churchill. The ships were all sunk by an attack "out of the blue", arousing German suspicions of a security breach.
To distract the Germans from the idea of a signals breach (such as Ultra), the Allies sent a radio message to a fictitious spy in Naples, congratulating him for this success. According to some sources the Germans decrypted this message and believed it.
In the Battle of the Atlantic, the precautions were taken to the extreme. In most cases where the Allies knew from intercepts the location of a U-boat in mid-Atlantic, the U-boat was not attacked immediately, until a "cover story" could be arranged. For example a search plane might be "fortunate enough" to sight the U-boat, thus explaining the Allied attack.
Some Germans had suspicions that all was not right with Enigma. Admiral Karl Dönitz received reports of "impossible" encounters between U-boats and enemy vessels which made him suspect some compromise of his communications. In one instance, three U-boats met at a tiny island in the Caribbean Sea, and a British destroyer promptly showed up. The U-boats escaped and reported what had happened. Dönitz immediately asked for a review of Enigma's security. The analysis suggested that the signals problem, if there was one, was not due to the Enigma itself. Dönitz had the settings book changed anyway, blacking out Bletchley Park for a period. However, the evidence was never enough to truly convince him that Naval Enigma was being read by the Allies. The more so, since B-Dienst, his own codebreaking group, had partially broken Royal Navy traffic (including its convoy codes early in the war), and supplied enough information to support the idea that the Allies were unable to read Naval Enigma.
By 1945 most German Enigma traffic could be decrypted within a day or two, yet the Germans remained confident of its security. Had they known better, they could have changed systems, forcing Allied cryptanalysts to start over.
At least three versions exist as to why Ultra was kept secret so long. Each has plausibility, and all may be true. First, as David Kahn pointed out in his 1974 New York Times review of Winterbotham's The Ultra Secret, after World War II the British gathered up all the Enigma machines they could find and sold them to Third World countries, confident that they could continue reading the messages of the machines' new owners.
A second explanation relates to a misadventure of Churchill between the World Wars, when he publicly disclosed information from decrypted Soviet communications This had prompted the Soviets to change their ciphers, leading to a blackout. The third explanation is given by Winterbotham, who recounts that two weeks after V-E Day, on 25 May 1945, Churchill requested that former recipients of Ultra intelligence not divulge the source or the information that they had received from it, in order that there be neither damage to the future operations of the Secret Service nor any cause for the Axis to blame Ultra for their defeat. Since it was British and, later, American message-breaking which had been the most extensive, this meant that the importance of Enigma decrypts to the prosecution of the war remained unknown. Discussion by either the Poles or the French of Enigma breaks carried out early in the war would have been uninformed regarding breaks carried out during the balance of the war. Nevertheless, the 1973 public disclosure of Enigma decryption in the book Enigma by French intelligence officer Gustave Bertrand generated pressure to discuss the rest of the Enigma–Ultra story.
The British ban was finally lifted in 1974, the year that a key participant on the distribution side of the Ultra project, F. W. Winterbotham, published The Ultra Secret.
The official history of British intelligence in World War II was published in five volumes from 1979 to 1988. It was chiefly edited by Harry Hinsley, with one volume by Michael Howard. There is also a one-volume collection of reminiscences by Ultra veterans, Codebreakers (1993), edited by Hinsley and Alan Stripp.
After the war, surplus Enigmas and Enigma-like machines were sold to many countries around the world, which remained convinced of the security of the remarkable cipher machines. Their traffic was not so secure as they believed, however, which is one reason the British and Americans made the machines available. Switzerland even developed its own version of Enigma, known as NEMA, and used it into the late 1970s.
Some information about Enigma decryption did get out earlier, however. In 1967, Polish military historian Władysław Kozaczuk in his book Bitwa o tajemnice ("Battle for Secrets") first revealed Enigma had been broken by Polish cryptologists before World War II. The same year, David Kahn in The Codebreakers described the 1944 capture of a Naval Enigma machine from U-505 and mentioned, somewhat in passing, Enigma messages were already being read by that time, requiring "machines that filled several buildings."
Ladislas Farago's 1971 best-seller The Game of the Foxes gave an early garbled version of the myth of the purloined Enigma. According to Farago, it was thanks to a "Polish-Swedish ring [that] the British obtained a working model of the 'Enigma' machine, which the Germans used to encipher their top-secret messages." "It was to pick up one of these machines that Commander Denniston went clandestinely to a secluded Polish castle [!] on the eve of the war. Dilly Knox later solved its keying, exposing all Abwehr signals encoded by this system." "In 1941 [t]he brilliant cryptologist Dillwyn Knox, working at the Government Code & Cypher School at the Bletchley center of British code-cracking, solved the keying of the Abwehr's Enigma machine."
By 1970, newer, computer-based ciphers were becoming popular as the world increasingly turned to computerised communications, and the usefulness of Enigma copies (and rotor machines generally) rapidly decreased. It was shortly after this, in 1974, a decision was taken to permit revelations about some Bletchley Park operations.
The United States National Security Agency (NSA) retired the last of its rotor-based encryption systems, the KL-7 series, in the 1980s.
F. W. Winterbotham, the first author to outline the influence of Enigma decryption on the course of World War II, likewise made the earliest contribution to an appreciation of Ultra's postwar influence, which now continues into the 21st Century — and not only in the postwar establishment of Britain's GCHQ (Government Communication Headquarters) and America's NSA. "Let no one be fooled," Winterbotham admonishes in chapter 3, "by the spate of television films and propaganda which has made the war seem like some great triumphant epic. It was, in fact, a very narrow shave, and the reader may like to ponder [...] whether [...] we might have won [without] Ultra."
Debate continues on whether, had postwar political and military leaders been aware of Ultra's role in Allied victory in World War II, these leaders might have been less optimistic about post-World War II military involvements.
Knightley suggests that Ultra may have contributed to the development of the Cold War. The Soviets received disguised Ultra information, but the existence of Ultra itself was not disclosed by the western Allies. The Soviets, who had clues to Ultra's existence, possibly through Kim Philby and Anthony Blunt, may thus have felt still more distrustful of their wartime partners.
The mystery surrounding the discovery of the sunk U-869 off the coast of New Jersey by divers Richie Kohler and John Chatterton was unraveled in part through the analysis of Ultra intercepts, which demonstrated that, although U-869 had been ordered by U-boat Command to change course and proceed to north Africa, near Rabat, the submarine had missed the messages changing her assignment and had continued to the eastern coast of the U.S., her original destination.
Category:Military intelligence Category:Signals intelligence of World War II
ar:ألترا (تعمية) de:Ultra (Kryptologie) fr:Ultra (nom de code) it:Ultra (crittografia) he:אולטרה ms:Ultra nl:Ultra (decryptie) pt:UltraThis text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
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